I have never heard an Estonian artist talking about his or her duties as a citizen during my whole career as an art critic. Instead, I once shared radio airtime with an artist who, half-jokingly, wondered which of his own kidneys he should sell to get by and still walk away from any political commitment. This kind of internalization of social and political challenges has become, since Van Gogh’s infamous ear surgery, a kind of mechanism of social control. All sociopolitical issues are preferably illuminated in terms of internal relapse, medical or not, of a particular person; while in treatment for these ‘relapses’, the competence of psychiatry and asylum procedures are strongly imposed. This kind of tendentious personification and victimization of the ‘chosen artistic few’ is but an irresistible and seductive trap for anyone obsessed with the Christian-romanticist idea of the lone martyr in the desert. Artists are, however, encouraged to develop a world-view, make an extraordinary freak show out of themselves and turn their exhibitions into ‘circus in town’ revelations. Temporary ones, of course. Any kind of festivity promotes, in its temporality, a kind of takenfor- granted obligation to ‘return to a normal routine when it’s all over’ and embrace again all the restrictive concepts of ‘business as usual’. No wonder this vicious cycle, this unavoidable and everlasting commitment to return again, makes any particular civic duty feel like an extra burden added to the regular gravity of social codes. I guess that is why the average Estonian artist always starts to look for a get-away car whenever it comes to political challenges. Or for ear surgery in Van Gogh style. Hear no evil…

But this is pretty much what is commonly expected from visual artists here in Estonia. They are, in fact, always advised to retreat from Realpolitik and initiate the revolutionary rhetoric of the avant-garde only on ‘symbolic barricades of culture’. And that goes for the whole of consumer society. Pierre Bourdieu mentions ‘symbolic revolutions’ a la ‘art will break out on the streets’ and ‘the barrier between stage and audience will disappear’ as radical experiments which paradoxically do not change a given society at all, but will still obey the popular thirst for threadbare classics of the ancient avant-garde. Converting the idea of social change into an artistic gesture brings along a complete change of focus – revolution is reduced to a particular genre of artistic creativity. It is like the basic narrative of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920’s, but in reverse: instead of having social change growing out of artistic gestures, we can testify to revolutionary ideas converted to a specific genre of current culture. This subsequently narrows down the whole scope to the extent where any idea of social activism or civic action will be cultivated and sublimated into film, theatre, art exhibitions and even musicals. And here you find Robocop, Phantom of the Opera, Faust, Zorro and all the other stray dogs running their extraordinary businesses of serving justice. In their popularized versions, the rhetoric of Romanticism and the avant-garde will compress ideas of social involvement into the daring vision of the lone, one and only, daredevil, who may get occasional applause from the audience but only when the play is all over and we are about to ‘return to normal’. No wonder any revolutionary spark is turned into a performance carnival. It’s cosier to stand up and fight evil with a nice bottle of beer in your hand or, even better, never leave your seat in the front row.

The alliance of cultural individualism and political liberalism suggests few alarming tendencies in the social structure of consumer society. Pierre Bourdieu argues for a certain atomisation of the social sphere and civic boundaries. In his passionate essay, entitled ‘The Essence of Neo-liberalism’, he asks first “What is neo-liberalism?” and answers himself immediately: “A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.” (1) In a subsequent essay, few social prospects are implied, although the major focus is on economic constraints which make any social bonds fall apart. One of these implied outcomes is an annihilation of community-oriented attitudes by means of the tendentious glorification of individual freedom. All attempts to get socially and politically organised are officially tempered by strongly advised individualist value systems, which eventually remove the cutting edge of all the potential root-level political coalitions. No up-and-coming political action group can assume significant weight in politics simply because collectivity is not considered to be good manners in an individualist culture. Noam Chomsky illustrates this embarrassing situation with examples from the United States. He claims that no trade union movement, workers’ organisation or social care system can be indicated in the world’s biggest industrial country, but there are plenty of official daydreams of human rights and individual freedom. (2) Everyone is provided with the freedom to choose his or her own personal trajectory of both social and political marginalisation, while maintaining the self-illusion of remaining the master of his or her own fate.

This kind of fragmentation of the social body, very much alive in Estonia too, is not only about the inertia of social energy and fencing in its playground. Parallel to that, business and politics have reached a certain agreement on ‘sanitizing’ society. Measures are taken to consolidate the above-mentioned interest groups into one corporate landscape or, more specifically, into a theme park of the liberal market, where all the public characters lurking around stand for market values only. In this Disneyland of liberal ideology, artists are expected to speak their minds, no matter how offensive their statements may be to other parties. Freedom of speech and all the other constitutional rights come first, followed by what is left in rest of the world. Given this fundamentalist background, it seems that Western artistic culture has given up much of its civic responsibilities in order to stick with the customary romantic stereotype of the superior artist. Even worse, the prerogative of this particular breed of human beings to vocalise its personal opinions at any price, and make an artistic event out of the occasion, comes in very handy as a pretext for serving the liberal justice system in Islamic countries, all subject to communitarian ideologies. Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, and caricaturists of Yllands Posten have all contributed to the provocation and the subsequent demonization of the Orient just by evaluating it in Western liberal terms. And yes, the ‘all together now’ military action of NATO members against the Orient seems justified from the liberal perspective. Anyone may feel like joining the Artists for Demonization of the Orient action group if one looks into this end of the field-glass. But if there is, at least, a tiny chance that one is not entirely happy with this enrolment, one should give it deeper thought before joining the frenzy concerning their alleged freedom of speech and artistic creation. It is all about doing politicians’ dirty work anyway.

1 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Essence of Neo-liberalism http://www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/12/08bourdieu
2 Chomsky, Noam. Meedia ja võim. OÜ Konn, 2006, p 27 [Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. Open Media Series. Translation into Estonian]


Johannes Saar
(1964), art critic and curator, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia